As the fallout from the botched launch of Affordable Care Act's exchanges continues, it grows ever clearer that website glitches are only a small part of the problem with the cumbersome--and increasingly unworkable--law. One has to ask:Is President Barack Obama making this up as he goes?

It's hard to imagine that the President and the team charged with implementing Obamacare couldn't have foreseen the problems that have continually popped up. Yet, here we are, bringing in "tech surges" to examine the website problems, security experts to mitigate privacy concerns, insurance executives to "brainstorm" ways to actually insure people. And all the while the President has implied he was the last to know that storm clouds were on the immediate horizon.

There are two possible scenarios here:

One, the President is lying, and quite effectively. If he knew that the website wouldn't be up to snuff, or that millions of Americans would not, in fact, be able to keep their insurance plans if they liked them, then he simply made a calculation that many politicians make: Lies aren't necessarily fatal. Except when they are.........

Or two, Obama is hopelessly out of the loop. Whether it was the IRS scandal, the NSA spying program or these ACA collapses, no one in his immediate circle appears to have felt it necessary to inform the President of looming problems that he might have to answer for, let alone solve.

[SNIP]

Whether he was uninformed of or simply incurious about the potential failures, Obama's lack of preparedness and competence in implementing his signature piece of legislation not only diminishes his credibility as a problem-solver, but it jeopardizes the faith in government that liberals rely on. When government looks hapless, private-sector innovators are empowered and emboldened. For liberals, that's bad for business. Better they hope he was merely being dishonest.

Gosh, Obumbo must really be in deep doodoo if the Communist News Network is being critical of their messiah.

S.E. Cupp is hardly a Lib/Prog. But neither is she a hard-core conservative. Not guilty on both accounts. And, I might add, she's also not guilty on yet a third account, which I shall leave to your imagination (I'm too tired to play with html now).

When you go back 2008 and examine the weak resume that Senator Obama had....logic would dictate questions to be asked and normally....some journalists would have stepped up to say that he had no executive background, no management experience, no legislative experience (weak at best in Illinois), and just simply gave good speeches. In essence, an empty suit.

So five years have passed, and now the mighty media are waking up to grasp the meaning of the empty suit.

He really never understood the healthcare act. No one on his staff ever understood it. No Democratic Senator or Representative ever understood it. You can find virtually no one who claims to have read the whole thing.

As naive as they now seem....the audience stands there in amazement. The manager from the Kansas City Royals...probably could have done a better job at doing this entire mess. We could have hired some comedian from Burbank to crack jokes and act like the President, and he could have been slightly better.

We asked for naive leadership....voting in abundance for it, and we got it.

There is incompetence on both sides. There is no doubt in my mind that a select few knew not only knew that the so called website wasn’t ready but that they withheld that information. From the key senators leading the charge to defund.

But the incompetence on our side continues. Take the the Saturday 11/16/13 radio fireside rebuttal to Obama’s assertions on globull warming given by Senator Ron Johnson .

It should have been anticipated Obama would divert and deflect attention from their nightmare creation even if they weren’t given an advance copy of Obama’s talk. Instead of waiting for that to be released and examined they went ahead with a canned pronouncement allowing the political opposition to proclaim victory over another unresponded to mess they created, fuel prices.

While Obama is way over his head so are the people running the Republican Campaign Senate and House committees.

I vote for both lying and clueless. Actually, he’s not clueless, many of his initiatives are part of his long-range strategy of making the U.S. Western Sweden. He just isn’t as nearly smart as he thinks he is. There’s no way the Swedes would botch a plan like this. But then the Swedes are the ones who keep importing violent Muslims, so maybe they’re not so smart either. And yes, I know we import violent muslims (Somalis) as well.

Here’s a thought I haven’t seen anywhere. What if insurance companies are, in fact, part of all of this? They get higher rates. The Democrats get a path to a single payer system and control of the health care system. The people who lose are the taxpayers who now have to pay higher rates for policies that they don’t need.

Unfortunately THEIR FUNCTION IS TO DECEIVE (the least discerning half of) THE PUBLIC.

Adam Smitth said that people of any given trade naturally tend to conspire agains the public, to the extent that it is unfortunate they cannot be kept from talking to each other at all.

He also said that to the extent that you believe ANYONE, to that extent he is your leader “and director.” Anyone who insists on being believed implicitly is a a con artist. Journalists do that with their “objectivity” claims - and as best illustrated by the example of George Stephanopolis, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between a journalist and a Democrat operative.

And whereas a Republican may get to Washington actually representing the public, once there he talks to other politicians too much - and tends strongly toward joining that trade’s “conspiracy against the public.”

17
posted on 11/17/2013 2:56:07 AM PST
by conservatism_IS_compassion
(Liberalism is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)

"If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period!" [a promise repeated verbatim by up-for-reelection Democrats]. Obama got his second term with that lie but it will sink other Democrats. It will lame-duck Obama in the 1st year of his 2nd term.

Of course it's a fascist system with healthcare insurance providers coerced by the promise of greater profit in exchange for loss of autonomy.

That's why certain establishment Republicans kept insisting that it cannot be undone, they were on board and had been for three years, which is the oft-repeated amount of time it took to get things set up on the insurors’ end to have regulation-compliant plans at the ready for rollout and replacement of non-compliant plans which had to be cancelled and so the rollout could not be moved. Three years. 2010, it's been a fait accompli since then.

That's why those same establishment Republicans ran for the tall grass in recently denouncing Obamacare as the level of sheer, unworkable incompetence became undeniably evident, as far as the government's end of executing this monstrosity. Their political donors who stood to profit from the arrangement were angry that the whole program had been so thoroughly botched and greenlighted the pivot away from support.

I wish we would look at the problems with Obamacare like we did with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The Dreamliner had numerous problems before it was certified for flight. Boeing spent countless man hours going over every problem to make sure there was nothing that would jeopardize the safety of the Dreamliner. Those who would fly in that aircraft would expect no less.

We all remember when in January 16, 2013, the ANA flight from Ube to Tokyo Haneda was diverted after a burning smell was detected. Inspection revealed a battery fire. A Similar incident on a JAL 787s at Boston's Logan Airport created a huge crisis for Boeing's state-of-the-art airline. All 50 in-service Boeing 787s were grounded. Below is a photo of that totally burnt battery:

Did anyone protest the grounding of those 50 Dreamliners? Would you feel safe flying in the 737 knowing it had a battery problem?

The Republicans in the House are like aircraft engineers who have the Constitutional mandate to insure the flight readiness of the law. In the case of Obamacare, there are so numerous problems that it has to be scraped. They are saying that Obamacare is a plane that won't fly. Americans know that Obamacare is wrong and the Democrats have secretly known it all along too. The fact that Obama wants no changes made is a clue to his tactic. It is a tactic to pin the image of obstructionism on the Republicans. This tactic, including the politics of personal destruction, is all they know. They know if they stonewall the Republicans, they can neutralize the majority power of the House Republicans and can use it to vilify them for the 2014 elections. It is an election tactic. They are willing to use an election tactic, knowing very well it will do great damage to the country. Let's call them what they are: Terrorists.

President Obama is in the cockpit crying like a maniac, Get this plane off the ground! He is sounding more and more like a cry baby having a tantrum that is willing to take the Flight Obamacare to disaster to play his political game.

The aircraft engineers have discovered they must take all the bad parts out and rebuild it from the ground up. As it is, the plane won't fly.

21
posted on 11/17/2013 3:13:21 AM PST
by jonrick46
(The opium of Communists: other people's money.)

If CNN is off the reservation, then it must be really bad for team Obama. The Clinton New Network probably knows this is really bad for Hillary since she also said the mantra "If you like your plan you can keep your plan". They know Obama is now an albatross around her neck so CNN now throws him under the bus to save her.

If there's a single payer system, the insurance companies will be left out completely.

Not initially. Few CEOs don't care about the future of their companies. They care about their bottom line today. I hate to sound conspiratorial but people should remember it was the insurance companies that helped craft this bill.

Who wrote this 2000 page Obamacare bill with 20,000 pages of regulations (and growing, with total discretion for how it’s implemented left up to the HHS administrator - and apparently safeguarded against constitutional push-back in the face of presidential dictates about how it’s enforced - or not enforced)?

If there's a single payer system, the insurance companies will be left out completely.

I am trying to find statistics on the number of workers in the health insurance industry bureaucracy. Lets say it is 2 million. So if the USA goes to a single payer system then you will still need most of that bureaucracy to admin a National Health Care system, right? So will all of these private sector bureaucrats suddenly become GS employees?

31
posted on 11/17/2013 3:36:24 AM PST
by central_va
(I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)

.........But the incompetence on our side continues. Take the the Saturday 11/16/13 radio fireside rebuttal to Obamas assertions on globull warming given by Senator Ron Johnson.

It should have been anticipated Obama would divert and deflect attention from their nightmare creation even if they werent given an advance copy of Obamas talk. Instead of waiting for that to be released and examined they went ahead with a canned pronouncement allowing the political opposition to proclaim victory over another unresponded to mess they created, fuel prices......"

GOP Rep. accuses Dems of 'political fraud' [full text] The Hill: "Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) used Saturday's Republican address to accuse President Obama and Democrats of committing political fraud in their marketing of the healthcare law.

Johnson said Democrats' promise that Americans would be able to keep their healthcare plans was fully vetted, coldly calculated, and carefully crafted to deceptively sell the law to voters. Republicans have seized on the cancellation of millions of plans and problems with the government's insurance portal to paint the law as a hopeless mess.

Those assurances weren't slight exaggerations or innocent shadings of the truth, said Johnson, who has introduced legislation allowing people to keep their plans. It was a political fraud echoed relentlessly by House and Senate Democrats who should be held accountable for the disastrous consequences of their grand deception.

Johnson said such massive fraud in the private sector would bear serious legal ramifications. He went on to accuse the president of delivering a phony apology that did not fully recognize his administration's responsibility.

It was like telling someone you're sorry their dog died, but refusing to acknowledge you ran over the dog, Johnson said. Sorry Mr. President, it didn't work. Millions of Americans are coming to realize that those are your tire tracks on their cancelled policies.

The speech creates added pressure on the Democrat-controlled Senate to bring up Johnson's bill. The legislation has been co-sponsored by every Senate Republican and the House easily passed similar legislation on Friday, with six Democrats breaking with Obama.

The White House opposes the bill, arguing that it would undermine the healthcare law. The president has proposed an administrative fix but Republicans say it doesn't provide enough of a guarantee.

Johnson also said he'll soon be introducing another bill, the Preserve Freedom and Choice in Health Care, which he said will attempt to protect liberty and the rights of individuals to make their own health care decisions. He called on voters to hold Democrats accountable for the health law's shortcomings with a very loud voice" so that Republicans can enact alternatives.

Democrat Senators must help Republicans pass legislation to limit the damage of Obamacare, he said. If not, those who choose to ignore the plight of millions of Americans should be replaced next November by those who will act. [end]

“Few CEOs don’t care about the future of their companies. They care about their bottom line today.”

CEO compensation is heavily weighted to performance in the current year. The average CEO of a publicly held company has a tenure of 3 years. Given the compensation bias toward short term performance and short tenure, the CEO is motivated to focus on today and worry about tomorrow later. The CEO is a hired hand trying to maximize her/his income. Usually corporate CEO’s have a small amount of their personal wealth tied up in the company. If the company goes under in a few years, the CEO has already banked his multimillion dollar compensation package for 2013 and 2014. If he perceives the company will fail in two to three years due to Obamacare he’ll do everything he can to maximize his compensation this year, regardless of the long term impact. At the same time he’ll be aggressively seeking a job heading up a company in another industry.

Entrepreneurs owning privately held small businesses or larger companies think differently. They usually have most of their personal wealth tied up in the business and therefore have the financial incentive to drive long term performance. They will sacrifice current year profits in order to ensure stronger performance in the future. If the company fails in two to three years the entrepreneur loses everything so he will do whatever he can to make sure the company survives even if the actions required for the company will result in a personal financial loss.

The CEOs of Humana, Blue Cross, United Healthcare and the other big insurance companies will financially gain from this debacle no matter whether or not the bargain they made with big government fails. It will be the entrepreneurial owners of small medical equipment suppliers and medical device manufacturers (i.e. job creating small business) who will lose income in the short term as they try to position their companies in a time of great uncertainty and capricious government regulation. Likely they will ultimately lose their companies and their accumulated life savings as government increasingly decides the winners and losers in the healthcare industry by arbitrarily dictating pricing and product specifications based on political considerations.

34
posted on 11/17/2013 4:04:47 AM PST
by Soul of the South
(Yesterday is gone. Today will be what we make of it.)

What this means is that in the time we were attacked at Pearl Harbor to the day Germany surrendered is not enough time for this federal government to build a working webpage.

Mobilization of millions, building tens of thousands of tanks, planes, jeeps, subs, cruisers, destroyers, torpedoes, millions upon millions of guns, bombs, ammo, etc. Turning the tide in North Africa, Invading Italy, D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Race to Berlin - all while we were also fighting the Japanese in the Pacific!!

And they can’t build a webpage.

36
posted on 11/17/2013 4:23:44 AM PST
by freeangel
( (free speech is only good until someone else doesn't like it)

The insurance industry did help craft the bill because they were promised millions of new customers. Obama had to get them on board so that they would not object to any aspect of the bill before it was passed. IMO, the goal of this entire exercise in futility was to eventually bring the USA to a single payer system and destroy the insurance industry in the process. Obama himself is on record saying that very thing several years ago and Harry Reid admitted the same thing more recently.

What really frosts me more than anything is that the real villains in this are the mainstream media! If we had a responsible, independent media, I really think Obama would not even have received the nomination, much less been elected POTUS. They suppressed every negative thing that they knew about Obama's background and have allowed him to get away with offenses that would have them demanding the impeachment of a Republican president. Only the total incompetence demonstrated by the Obamacare roll out and the evidence that he blatantly and intentionally lied for years about the true details of the plan has gotten them to tell even a little bit of the truth about this evil man.

39
posted on 11/17/2013 4:32:49 AM PST
by srmorton
(Deut. 30 19: "..I have set before you life and death,....therefore, choose life..")

He is little more than a teleprompter reader. He is incredibly evil and not very smart.

His concerns are only what makes him feel good. This includes (in approximate order of priority):
drugs
gay sex
sticking it to whitey
revenge on America
feeling important by giving speeches and appearing on tv
golf
parties
vacations
hobnobbing with celebrities
pretending to be an intellectual by learning to parrot a few stock phrases (”punching above their weight class” was one of my favorites. See this (sad/hilarious) link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYpXzE9Pxs)
pretending to be an intellectual by learning to operate a Blackberry
pretending to be an intellectual by claiming to have an academic record and book authorship
pretending to be an intellectual by carrying around a book

He is not the architect of any of this. He is mostly clueless about what goes on and his handlers keep him in line by several means:
allowing him the delusion that he is smart and in charge
controlling his drug access
money
threatening to expose his sexual preferences
threatening to expose his origins

Sometimes the speeches and tv appearances are unpleasant for him rather than a means of stroking his ego. He does not like questions because he has no answers. He much prefers the adoring sycophants applauding him.

Reasons he is so often late for events:
drug balance needs to stabilize
sticking it to whitey
petty need to inconvenience others in order to “prove” he is more important (more ego gratification)
contempt for those he inconveniences

Why he lies:
he is told to
he often does not even understand the lies he is reading from the teleprompter
(see also reasons for other behavior above)
CYA
it’s a deeply ingrained habit. He lies even when he doesn’t need to
he is afraid that if he ever allows any truth to escape, the whole thing might start to unravel
whatever the current lie is, it’s probably covering up for some previous lie

41
posted on 11/17/2013 4:57:25 AM PST
by generally
(Don't be stupid. We have politicians for that.)

The reason they are having trouble coming to grips with this is that the left would then have to admit that they were either stupid enough to be duped or undiscerning enough to fail to detect incompetence. Either one is an admission they are not going to make, as they earn their bread selling the authority of their investigative and analytical abilities.

That ain't gonna happen.

So, they stall with puff pieces like this selling pretended insight.

46
posted on 11/17/2013 5:07:31 AM PST
by Carry_Okie
("Single payer" is Medicaid for all; they'll pull the sheet over your head when you're done.)

There is a third possibility. What if it is going according to plan. Too many people could have predicted these problems, knowing anything about economics, one could easily predict the failures we are seeing. For instance, in today’s tech world, you would almost have to PROGRAM what we are seeing at the web site. I run a web site ... I would have to “make” it have problems as bad as this website is showing. I really believe they WANT the chaos and collapse of health care system. We are experiencing the transformation of America...it isn’t coming, it it HERE...we are inside the coup.

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